Barriers to Intimacy (1 John 1:5-2:2)

Sermon Notes

Sermon Series: How to Live, How to Love

Sermon Title: Barriers to Intimacy

Passage: 1 John 1:5-2:2

Preacher: Ashley Herr

Who God Is (1:5)

• God as light is good (Genesis 1), safe (Psalm 27), present (Exodus 3, 13), and holy (Psalm 104)

Responding to Who God Is (1:6-2:2)

1st Claim (1:6-7)

• Living in the darkness involves: embracing sin and hiding sin

Dangers of the Darkness

1. Sin separates you from God and others

2. Sin leads you out of the light and into the darkness

3. Shame keeps you hiding sin in the darkness

We hide, terrified of the vulnerability that the intimacy we desire requires

• We hide what we’ve done

• We hide what’s been done to us

• We hide our suffering

• We hide our thoughts and desires

• We hide who we are

2nd Claim (1:8-9)

We deceive ourselves by

• Hiding our sin

• Ignoring our sin

• Excusing our sin

• Justifying our sin

• Redefining our sin

• Tolerating our sin

• Embracing our sin

3rd Claim (1:10-2:2)

Reflection

• Father, help us to see the ways we’ve hidden our sin from you

• Father, help us to bring our sin out of the darkness and into the light

• Father, help us create a culture of vulnerability where others feel safe stepping out of the darkness

• Father, help us take a step of courage this week in sharing with someone else

Sermon Footnotes

• “Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Life Together, p112)

• “We recognize early and often that shame tends to be self-reinforcing. When we experience shame, we tend to turn away from others because the prospect of being seen or known by another carries the anticipation of shame being intensified or reactivated. However, the very act of turning away, while temporarily protecting and relieving us from our feeling (and the gaze of the "other"), ironically simultaneously reinforces the very shame we are attempting to avoid. Notably, we do not necessarily realize this to be happening - we’re just trying to survive the moment. But indeed this dance between hiding and feeling shame itself becomes a tightening of the noose. We feel shame, and then feel shame for feeling shame. It begets itself.” - Curt Thompson (The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves, p31)